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Takeaways from PHIL classes

The way I conceptualize philosophy is as an emulsifier; it bridges together two topics that are otherwise not conciliable, or you'd think so at least. How? By contextualizing them. Too many people focus on the conceptual substance that is included in philosophy classes.

PHIL of Language ---------------

What is mostly practically applicable is in the realm of pragmatics.

1. The concept of a QUD elucidates what is so disturbing about political diversion and whataboutism; a statement that on the surface, seems right and irrefutable such as "All lives matter," but pragmatics explains the actual speech-act it is doing

2. The synthetic-analytic distinction There actually isn't a clear distinction between empirically verifiable statements such as "All swans are white" and unverifiable ones such as "God is all-great and all-mighty"

3. The distinction between locution, illocutionary force, and perlocutionary force has implications for social justice

4. The Kripke/Putnam concept of “division of linguistic labor”

We often defer to linguistic experts to define things like H2O while the commoner cannot explain what exactly it is. Doesn’t this have implications for epistemology at large and social responsibility?

Semantic ascent

PHIL of Emotion ---------------

1. The old emotion vs. logic debate

Put simply, emotions are highly intelligent and a form of reasoning. The mereology of emotion (emotions have a form/structure, an intentional object, a formal object)

2. The breaking down of specific emotions (grief, forgiveness) has allowed me to recognize them in my life; also, knowing what they consist of helps me in my regulation of them.

Ok, but I also supplemented readings from psychology and CPTSD to discover the following:

3. The interconnectedness of many emotions. Shame is often the underlying emotion of anger. Anger drives one to perceive injustice.

4. The role of empathy in our decision-making; rather, the role of emotion period in our decision-making. Studies have shown that autistic individuals and psychopathic individuals, both neurodivergent when it comes to experiencing certain constitutive emotions, have trouble with morality.

When you see a stranger beating up a child, it is not clear if you’d be alerted to the injustice if you did not experience the initial burst of anger.

Meaning of Life

PHIL of Science

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Nestle, Food Politics (re-read)

Marion Nestle

Chair of an academic department of nutrition

Member of federal advisory committees

Commentator on nutrition issues

Introduction

In the US, the food supply is so abundant that it contains enough to feed everyone in the country nearly twice over = competition to convince people to eat more of their products

To satisfy stockholders, food companies must convince people to eat more of their products instead of those of competitors.

The primary mission of food companies is to sell products. They are not health agencies. Nutrition becomes a factor in corporate thinking only when it can help sell food.

Early in twentieth century

Principal causes of death were infectious diseases related to malnutrition

The goals of health officials, nutritionists, and food industry were identical - to encourage people to eat more of all kinds of food

Nowadays, our problem is overeating

The food industry’s problem with “eat less”

Conflict of interest

For a decade, federal health officials dealt with constant congressional meddling with their dietary recommendations: Producers of foods would complain to Congress about "eat less" messages. (3)

Ways the food industry strikes back:

Producing ambiguous dietary advice

Spending enormous $$$ lobbying Congress

Funding research on food/nutrition

Publicizing the results of selected research studies favorable to the industry

What is a healthy diet?

Must contain enough energy (calories), vitamins, minerals, and other essential nutrients

Must not contain excessive amounts that might promote development of chronic diseases

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Butler, Measure

Short story of the village that knows their death dates worn on a locket around their neck

What practical and moral concerns are there against measurement?

Kilogram prototype - the object against which all other weights are measured

Universal standards of measurement are useful only insofar as they allow us to measure other things that are deemed to be valuable in some way.

Measurement, in other words, is a process of bringing disparate things under the same abstract rubric

Even though the quantity of a working day is fixed, there is no end to how the quality of labor can be manipulated and stretched (Think: "I don't care how you do it, I just want it done by the end of the day!")

Psychometrics

Designed to quantitatively assess our inner conditions such as cognitive ability or emotional traits

Personality Tests - now used for recruitment, training and development, cultural engineering, organizational planning, employee engagement

Problem: personality tests blur the line between the descriptive and the normative (e.g. the wording of “too much” ambition)

Aristotelian measurement vs. today’s measurement

Today,  we  tend  to  associate  measurement  with  scientific  instruments  that measure  something  ‘objectively’,  i.e.  without  relying  on  the  perspective  of the  individual.  It  is  Aristotle’s  idea  of  measure,  of  a  ‘just  measure’,  that  is lost  in  our  culture’s  obsession  with  quantitative  metrics.  

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Earman and Salmon, Chapter 2

Veridical - an observation that correctly reveals features (e.g. size, shape, color, and texture) of what we're observing

Illusory - an observation that does not

We have observational vocabulary pertaining to entities, properties, and relations that we can observe. We have theoretical terms for those we cannot.

Much of our scientific knowledge depends on inference as well as observation. (For example, we cannot observe the future nor the past with the dinosaurs).

Hypothesis - some statement from which observational consequences can be drawn Are confirmed (to some degree) or disconfirmed

Hypothetico-Deductive Method

Typically known as THE method of scientific inference

(Note: The hypothesis cannot be the only premise. The initial conditions must provide the other premises. PROBLEM: The conclusion can be perfectly valid while one (+) of its premises are false.)

Note: We do not observe everything directly (e.g. the temperature of the gas). We are relying on an auxiliary hypothesis to the effect that the thermometer is a reliable instrument for the measurement of temperature.

What happens if a H-D test produces a negative outcome (disconfirms hypothesis)? It's not straightforward that the hypothesis should be refuted. For example, astronomers who used Newtonian mechanics to predict the orbit of Uranus found their predictions were incorrect. In their calculations, they'd only taken account of the gravitational influences of the planets that were known at the time. Instead of taking the negative H-D test as a refutation of Newtonian mechanics, they postulated the existence of another planet that had not previously been observed. That planet, Neptune, was observed shortly thereafter. (An auxiliary hypothesis concerning the constitution of the solar system was rejected rather than Newtonian mechanics)

Problems with the H-D Method

1) Problem of alternative hypotheses - When an observational result of an H-D test confirms a given hypothesis, it also confirms infinitely many other hypotheses that are incompatible with the given one.

We usually prefer the simplest hypothesis. But why should we?

2) Problem of statistical hypotheses - Some hypotheses (i.e. statistical ones) cannot be deduced

Hempel (and Glymour)’s Solutions

Paradox of the Ravens

Three auxiliary hypothesis: (1) Instance confirmation: Observing a single instance of an F being a G confirms (at least marginally) that All F's are G's (2) Equivalence: All F's are G's = Non-G's are non-F's (3) Reformulation of All F's are G's = Anything non-G is a non-F

By simply observing a non-black thing (and thus, a non-raven), we confirm the equivalent hypothesis that all ravens are black, which means simply by observing an instance of a non-black thing, we can observe all ravens are black

Goodman’s Paradox

Hume’s Problem of Induction

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Privacy, SEP, Section 3

Privacy and Control over Information

...unconvincing?

Privacy and Human Dignity

Bloustein: Privacy protects the value called “inviolate personality,” which defines  “one’s essence as a human being and it includes individual dignity and integrity, personal autonomy and independence”

Privacy and Intimacy

Privacy is important because without it, intimacy would not exist.

Intimacy is important because it allows one’s development as an individual with a moral and social personality able to form intimate relationships involving respect, love, friendship and trust

Privacy and Restricted Access

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The Scientific Revolution

Introduction

There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, construed as the start of modernity, as a fundamental reordering of the way we think about the natural world.

Historians are uneasy about this portrait - that there was a singular discrete event, or even that there was a coherent cultural entity called “science.”

Most people at the time in 17th century did not believe what expert scientific practitioners believed

Assumptions taken for granted in the book

1) Science is a social and contextual phenomenon, historically embedded

The traditional demarcation between “intellectual factors” (ideas themselves) and “social factors (e.g. political/economic influences on science) shouldn’t be there

2) There is no “essence” of the Scientific Revolution. Meaning that there is a multiplicity of stories that can be told, and being a historian necessarily involves the selection of historical stories.

What, how, and why***

4 interrelated aspects of changes in knowledge about the natural world

1) The mechanization of nature: the use of mechanical metaphors to construe natural processes

2) The growing separation between human subjects and the natural objects of their knowledge

3) The attempted mechanization of knowledge-making; the proposed deployment of explicitly formulated rules of method that aimed at disciplining the production of knowledge by managing or eliminating the effects of human passions and interests

4) The aspiration to use the resulting natural knowledge to achieve moral, social, and political ends

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PHIL of Science - Ladyman Intro & Chapter 1

Book will mostly focus on the philosophy of natural science Scientific expertise is relied on on an unparalleled level

If scientists appointed by a government official say x, x will be taken seriously.

What questions does the philosophy of science answer?

Not ethics

Not sociology, psychology, or history

Some think empirical inquiry should not be separated from philosophy after all (philosophy isn’t an “armchair” way of knowing)

What is science?

Problem of demarcation (Whether or not to separate fields into “science” or “not”)

Methodology of scientific method

Laws of nature

Its aims: (1) describe what we see (2) offer rules and explanations

Epistemology

Core questions of epistemology: How can we have knowledge vs. justified belief?

What does it mean to know something? A necessary condition: That something is true Another condition: That we be justified in believing something is true

This rules out (1) We cannot know that Paris is the capital of Korea if it’s false, and (2) I know the bus will be 5 mins late today, but it was just a guess (no justification)

Philosophy of science

What is the scope of science?

Question: How can experiments and observations ever “prove” a theory to be true?

Most of us “believe” in the majority of science because of what others tell us.

History of science

Scholasticism: The marrying of Aristotle’s theories with Christianity

All motion on Earth is in a fundamentally straight line

Heliocentrism became widely accepted following the publications of the astronomer Copernicus

Instrumentalism - The philosophical doctrine that says theories need not be literally true, but are convenient fictions

In 1616, the Catholic Church placed Copernicus’s publication on heliocentrism on a list of banned books

The Aristotelian concept of knowledge used to be restricted to deductive logic. The problem with deductive logic is that it limits our knowledge to what can be implicitly stated in the premises.

One has to start with first principles, a knowledge of the essence of things - teleology

No place for sensory experience, which contradicts the empiricism held by modern science!

Francis Bacon

Propagandist for the sciences, wanted science to be a collective and collaborative enterprise

Page 23 left off

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Types of Identity Crises

(1) Displacement

(2) Constrictment

(3) Overwhelming Freedom

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Film History (kubricklynch), Beginner’s Guide to French Cinema

France’s strong connection to art world

Government protects the film industry

Highest density of movie theaters in the world

Cannes Film Festival culture

French New Wave

Stylistic experimentation

Highly referential; very aware of film history

Jean-Luc Goddard (Breathless)

Truffaut - helped bring about the auteur theory

The Left Bank (Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, mon Amour)

La Jetee (experimental, still-photographs) remade as 12 Monkeys

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

A Trip to the Moon

French Impressionist Cinema

Naturalistic acting

On-location shooting

Poetic Realism

Featured people on the fringes of society (most often prostitutes, drug dealers)

Often had sad stories

Jean Renoir (The Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game)

New French Extremity

Gaspard Noe (Climax, Enter the Void, Irreversible)

Influenced by horror and exploitation genres

BPM Au revoir les enfants Le Samourai

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Multipotentialite

Here are the "superpowers" of those multipotentialites:

1) Idea synthesis

Innovation happens at the intersection of multiple disciplines

2) Rapid learning

3) Adaptability

Nora Dunn - freelance writer, child concert pianist Abe Cajudo

"Ask yourself where you learned to assign the meaning of wrong or abnormal to doing many things" "You learned it from the culture"

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Meaning of Life

Most philosophical theories/philosophical consensus seems to think that meaning of life must consist of 

attachment to something external to one’s own life (e.g. Mintoff - something trasncendent), something which is permanent, actually objectively good, significant and non-arbitrary

The usual objections that threaten to undercut conventional theories of meaning, are that

(mostly using Nagel’s account of absurdity)

Our goals are arbitrary, insignificant, and impermanent

Even when our goals are significant in some way, we often strive in futility to achieve them. Exhausting our effort towards something but not achieving it does not confer meaning on our life.

In addition, we must choose our own goals.

Theories of life that have stood out to me have been:

Theories of self-negation (Buddhism, Strawson’s “against narrativity”)

Sartre’s “existence precedes essence”

Fulfillment vs. meaning

Taylor’s modification of a pointless activity to a fulfilling activity

Aiming for something that is not-predefined, and maybe impossible to achieve (Mill on achieving happiness, Levy on superlative meaning)

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The Knowledge Machine

Popper: Induction can never validate a theory. Scientists gather evidence not to validate theories, but to refute them.

Make a list of all possible theories and try to refute them one by one.

Out of the remaining theories, Popper thought there was no reason to favor one over the other (RADICAL!)

Scientists should consequently devote themselves to reducing the size of the pool of surviving theories by refuting as many ideas as possible. Popper’s logic of inquiry requires of its scientific personnel a murderous resolve. Seeing a theory, their first thought must be to understand it and then to liquidate it. Only if scientists throw themselves single-mindedly into the slaughter of every speculation will science progress.

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Joel Feinberg, “Absurd Self-Fulfillment”

Central question:

For each of the authors, what is the relation between the absurd and self-fulfillment?

What does he/she recommend we do?

Richard Taylor's conception of the absurd - is "pointlessness." Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill for no reason. It would not make it any less pointless if he had a partner (pointless != lonely), nor any less pointless if the boulder were a small pebble instead (pointless != painful)

When asked about the meaning of life, “optimists” say that to the extent a life is self-fulfilled, it is a good life. “Pessimists” say that all lives are absurd in some way, even if one manages to find self-fulfillment.

These two are talking about two different things. Self-fulfillment and absurdity are not the same. Taylor suggests plausibly that life might be BOTH self-fulfilling and absurd.

What is absurdity?

An act that runs counter to the larger purpose for which it's chosen

There are always two things clashing in disharmony. 

Nagel: The clash is between unavoidable pretension of taking ourselves seriously, and the reality that nothing we do actually matters

Taylor: The clash is between the labor that is considered to be sheer drudgery and no kind of purpose whatsoever. (pointlessness)

What is pointlessness? Triviality? Futility?

“Pointless” - Labor that has no purpose which gives it value or explanation

“Triviality” - Labor that has a purpose, but the benefit you gain is completely not worth it

“Futility” - Labor that has a purpose, but you will never achieve it

To say that all of human life is absurd is unintelligible. It doesn't give us much information, because these "pessimists" cannot say what life would be like if it were non-absurd

For Taylor, non-absurdity would look like if Sisyphus's temple "endures, adding beauty to the world for the remainder of time" (no less than eternity suffices). But he must die afterwards while his temple endures for eternity, for if he survives, he will fall prey to boredom sooner or later.

The pessimists (Camus, Nagel, Taylor) seem committed to thinking that no human activity is ever valuable in itself, because justification for any part of the activity is indefinitely postponed.

But you can argue this by saying individual activities (e.g. taking aspirin) do meet their own end, even if human life as a whole doesn't.

Nagel's view can be refuted when you realize he is merely talking about a way a life may seem absurd [to the person herself], and not actually be absurd. By not reflecting too hard, one can escape that.

What is self-fulfillment?

Some theorists exclude the activities that fulfill subjective dispositions, and only include dispositions that are common to human nature.

But this is a bad idea. There are many possible careers that may fulfill one’s human nature, but one cannot chose by adopting the stance of “fulfillment for general human nature”

In general, self-fulfilling tasks are ones that best fit one’s “latent talents, interests, and initial bent” with one’s “evolving self-ideal”

“The life of fulfillment strikes us as one that comes into being prone and equipped to do its thing, and then uses itself up doing that thing, without waste, blockage, or friction” It follows that self-fulfillment must be good as seen from an internal position, not some from some objectively regrettable point.

“If Hubert Humphrey’s life was fulfilling to him, that is a fact like any other, and it never ceases to be true that it was a fact.”

What to do?

Have self-love and accept one’s nature as a given

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Speed, The Practice and Science of Drawing, session 1

Intuition drives the best things in an artist’s work.

Study too much cold knowledge, and it may supplant the natural intuitive feeling of the student.

Art training can only deal with the perfecting of a means of expression... the real matter of art lies beyond the scope of teaching

What does is art? What does art deal with?

Tolstoy: “An action by means of which one man, having experienced a feeling, intentionally transmits it to others.”

Pure intellect wants to construct a point of view that is untouched by human feeling, one that is more stable and accurate, unaffected by the “ever-changing current of human life” (20)

But art... can only be measured by the feeling instrument.

Love of truth

“[The visual artist] has a consciousness of some correspondence with something the other side of visible things and dimply felt through them, a ‘still, small voice’ which he is impelled to interpret to man. It is the expression of this all-pervading inner significance that I think we recognize as beauty, and that prompted Keats to say:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” (22)

Love of beauty... love of truth...

Beauty is, strictly speaking, a state of mind rather than an attribute of certain objects

If a painter paints a mountain, there are more things at play besides form and color... there are associations, associations connected with its size, age, and permanence. It is down to the temperament of the painter on whether to play more with appearances or associations.

Art concerns arrangement...

Working definition: Art is “the rhythmic expression of feeling”

Feeling and technique are equally important. But you cannot teach people how to feel. All you can do is to surround them with the conditions calculated to stimulate any natural feeling they may possess.

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The Absurd: Nagel vs. Camus

Where is the clash?

Camus: between (1) Our desire to understand the world and (2) The world’s inability to let us understand it

Nagel: between (1) Our understanding that our place in the universe is inconsequential and arbitrary (2) Nonetheless, our inability to stop taking ourselves and our lives seriously

Is there a way to escape?

Nagel: There might be, but the cost is quite high:

One can attempt to be an ascetic and renounce personal projects, taking on the “universal” view as often as possible. But if one commits too hard to this project, it is self-defeating (because then it means we take ourselves seriously).

One can live like an animal without taking this step of reflection. But this is to reject what makes us human. (romantic view) 

What should we do, in light of this absurdity?

Camus: We should shake our fist and scorn at the absurdity.

Nagel: If we can view from the point of eternity that nothing matters, then we can also realize that the fact that nothing matters, doesn’t matter. So we can view it with a sense of ironic detachment.

Nagel believes Camus’s position is romantic and self-pitying. It’s almost as if Camus personifies the absurdity.

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Government Terms

Association = Organization - A group of people banded together for a common purpose

Committee -  A panel (or subpanel) with members from the House or Senate (or both) tasked with conducting hearings, examining and developing legislation, conducting oversight, and/or helping manage chamber business and activities.

These people are often meddling or have opposing interests to the rest of USDA, it seems

WHO

Executive Departments - 

Executive branch

Cabinet-level agencies each with a specific mission

The heads of all except the Justice Department (called the attorney general) are given the title “Secretary”. They, plus the President/Vice President, make up the “Cabinet of the US”

The President appoints the heads of the departments, but they are confirmed by the Senate

Agency - A permanent or semi-permanent organization within each executive department, including Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), National Institute of Health (NIH)

Eight federal uniformed Services - Service branches:

US Army

US Marine Corps

US Navy

US Air Force

US Space Force

US Coast Guard

US PHS Commissioned Corps (Public Health Service)

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Nestle - Food Politics (Part II: ch. 4-7)

Food companies use every means at their disposal—legal, regulatory, and societal—to create and protect an environment that is conducive to selling their products in a competitive marketplace.

Lobbying happens, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Chapter 4: Overview of food lobbying

Chapter 5: A different form of lobbying

Chapter 6: Hardball tactics

Chapter 7: Illegal lobbying-related actions

What is Lobbying?

Lobbying is any legal attempt (legally protected, not the same as bribery) by individuals or groups to influence government policy or action.

Food lobbyists are people who ask government officials to make laws that benefit their clients’ companies, whether or not they benefit anyone else.

At its best, lobbyists provide government officials with well-researched technical advice. This is partly why Congress is hesitant to limit lobbying. However, the pretense of “technical advice” gives excuses for frequent contact.

Lobbyists are hired, not elected (to differentiate them from advocates and independent experts). They are paid to represent private interests, and many of their activities are hidden.

Why is Congress so reluctant to delimit lobbying?

Lobbying is widely viewed as unenforceable and therefore, lobbying regulations ineffective.

In 1995, lobbying was finally defined in law. That law defines lobbyists as people who spend at least 20% of their time on such activities, have contact with government officials or staff, and are paid more than $5,000 in a six-month period for this work.

“It must be understood that this army of largesse-dispensing lobbyists represents every conceivable component of American corporate and private enterprise; no industry is too small, no group too isolated, and no opinion too extreme to forgo paying for its own professional lobbyist. With billion-dollar expenditures, lobbying is a huge industry unto itself.”

Food Lobbying

Congress and USDA

During WWII, the government and food producers worked together in sync. Post-war, farmers & food producers had come to view USDA as their department. This “agricultural establishment” was so strong that any federal policy related to agriculture could be ensured to be in the interest of the food producers (at the time, small rural farmers)

Service in committees was often long (18+ years), and strongly represented by members from street farms. The President and Secretary of Agriculture served short terms.

These reasons made it that the President and Secretary of Agriculture were virtually excluded from any significant role in policy decisions.

1970s

New interest groups formed: 

Consumers were conscious of food prices

Large processing and marketing companies formed as agriculture gained prominence in economy

Advocates of poor and food assistance programs

Ways of Lobbying

(1) “Hard money” and “soft money” transferals from lobbyists to federal officials

(2) The “revolving door”

Revolving Door

Government officials often become lobbyists, and lobbyists become government officials.